Important Warning: Installation of this driver requires removing the restricted-modules package in order to work. That package includes drivers for madwifi (Atheros wireless cards), nvidia cards, and a handful of other devices. I provide a work-around for the madwifi drivers, but you need to perform it before removing the restricted modules (jump to end of this this post).

When running the dpkg-reconfigure command you should answer the questions that you know and take the defaults for the rest. You might want to say no to the monitor detection--it has caused X-Windows to crash for some people.

Note 1: If after reboot, your system hangs at a black screen before taking you to a graphical login - reboot to 'recovery mode' and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use 'vesa' instead of 'ati'. Then continue with the steps below.

Note 2: You can change your xorg.conf file to Option "vesa" BEFORE rebooting, so after rebooting you can have usable X (and skip Note 1). Remember that you HAVE to reboot (just restarting X will leave you with unusable X).

Installing the new driver

This guide refers to the 32bit version of the driver. If you are using a x86_64 System you need the 64bit Installer. The installation procedure should be the same as for 32bit, except some filenames will differ slightly.

Change to the download directory. Make sure that you have the universe and multiverse repositories enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list before doing these steps. Sample sources.list.

Troubleshooting

General

Look for error messages in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and kern.log.
If you receive the (EE) No devices detected error message, it is highly possible that you own a Radeon from the 7000-7500 series with the R100 chip, which the proprietary Linux drivers don't support.

Madwifi Drivers in Breezy Badger

In order to continue using the madwifi driver you can do the following before removing the linux-restricted-modules package and rebooting.